Why is karma a bitch?

popular-refrains

I came across this saying "karma is a bitch" a few times while reading some comments online recently. I understand karma as a religious concept to mean "what goes around, comes around". I also understand that bitch is a derogatory word for insulting a woman.

Why is karma being referred to as a bitch? Is this a new interpretation on what karma is about?

Also used as the rhetorical question

Ain't karma a bitch?

Synonyms:

What goes around, comes around

Getting his just desserts

He had it coming

and strongly related to

Payback's a bitch

It is likely a mix of having bad Karma and the idiom Payback's a bitch, where Payback is performed by someone wronged by the now punished person, but Karma just happened to the person for some seemingly righteous reason not necessarily related to a person or physical entity.

The bitch part is personifying the concept Karma, which is claimed to have doled out the resulting punishment.

It is a taunt aimed at a person who is supposedly asking for the situation he is in, due to his previous actions.

So the person saying it, considers the one he says it to or about deserves to be punished because of something they did.

For example: someone is so busy pointing and laughing at a person who had an accident, that he walks straight into a lamp post and breaks his nose. His friend who did not find the accident they saw funny, could say "Ain't Karma a bitch?"

Here is a short movie giving a good idea: Karma's A Bitch from Justin Tan (Likely NSFW for some)

There's another meaning of bitch that should clear this up. From NOAD:

bitch (noun)
1 a female dog, wolf, fox, or otter.
2 informal derogatory a woman whom one dislikes or considers to be malicious or unpleasant.
• [in sing. ] informal a thing or situation that is unpleasant or difficult to deal with : the stove is a bitch to fix.

So, in the phrase karma is a bitch, the writer means: